Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label foreigners

PSB More Awesome Than Before

Welcome, foreigner! Although it's been policy to require foreigners to register residency with their local PSB for a long time now, it's probably only this year that the policy has grown some teeth, and the police have actually become insistent about enforcing it.  Just last week I found big white posters on the bulletin board by the gate of my apartment, and also on the doors to our units, marked with our police cartoon friend Jingjing (not to be confused with the Olympic panda mascot , whose name is spelled the same), giving us a friendly reminder to register at the local station for a temporary residence permit within 24 hours of the start of our stay.  And though personally so far I've been spared the intrusion, over the past several months I've been hearing stories from friends of friends who have had the police go door to door through their apartments asking to see foreigners' registration and fining those without. But what I just discovered, to my shoc...

How to Interact with Foreigners, and other Olympics Propaganda

Don't be "excessive" when helping handicapped people. The diagram shows how to say "Beijing Welcomes You" in sign language. Today I happened across a new series of posters on the neighborhood propaganda bulletin boards about etiquette to be observed during the Olympics.  Olympics propaganda is not new to Beijing, nor are paternalistic slogans on how to be a "civilized" citizen, but this new series in particular caught my eye because of one poster with a list of rules for how to act around foreigners.  Always curious to understand more about Chinese behavior towards us Western folk, I stopped to take a closer look.  Most delightful was a list of eight questions Chinese are not to ask us, which if observed, would leave these curious and enthusiastic hosts with essentially nothing with which to make conversation.  Following are some translated excerpts along with photos from some of the posters: Smile When Communicating with Foreigners A Smile...